


survival season

by again_please



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Absence makes the heart grow deeply sexually frustrated, Death Wish, Defeated First Order, F/M, Hermit Ben Solo, Kylo Ren in Hiding, Not explicitly suicidal but some mention of not wanting to live, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Tending Wounds, The Force Ships It, Wilderness Survival
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2019-10-13 11:43:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17487461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/again_please/pseuds/again_please
Summary: Kylo Ren disappeared without a trace over a year ago, having escaped with his life and not much else in the aftermath of the coup that overthrew him. While the Resistance defeated the splintered factions of the First Order that were left behind, the former Supreme Leader Ren’s whereabouts remain a mystery—or so most of the galaxy believes.One night, after a year of silence, Rey gets a call from the Force that she just can’t ignore.





	1. Chapter 1

Rey disembarks to find a planet in autumn. There’s a pleasant yet surprising crispness in the air that chills her exposed skin, enough so that she immediately backtracks up the ramp of the _Falcon_ to retrieve her arm wraps.

 

With a pang of something suspiciously like embarrassment, Rey realizes that she hadn’t even bothered to read about the climate or geography of her destination, even during the long hours she’d spent in travel, nothing to entertain or distract her but endless lines of hyperspace streaking past the viewport.

 

It had been summer on Naboo, warm, lush, and comfortable, and so she’d departed dressed for that sort of weather. She’d been in such a hurry, so single-mindedly focused on the need to _get_ here, she couldn’t even have said for sure that she’d known if the planet had a breathable atmosphere.

 

But the tracker had pointed her here. And so she’d come.

 

Funny, how the little tracking device had been a secret shame stowed away in the trunk beneath her bed for a year now. Secreted away, wrapped in cloth, it had been buried beneath the scant few trinkets she had to her name, such as the doll she’d crafted from scraps of a flight suit, Dosmit Raeh’s helmet, and the old journal she’d sketched in, all scavenged from her old bolt-hole when Finn had accompanied her on a visit back to Jakku in search of something like closure.

 

Now, as she clutches the thing in her hand, the only shame she feels is for the dust she has to wipe from the surface of it.

 

The tracker brought her this far, but the tech is meant to find a ship in the depths of space, not to pinpoint one person within a range of feet or inches. Fallen leaves crunch beneath her boots as Rey rotates on the spot, taking in the splendor of a forest populated with gargantuan trees, their trunks so big around that she’s certain a single person couldn’t wrap their arms around one, and so tall that she has to look straight up to see the tops dappled in hues of scarlet, amber, and marigold.

 

It appears that she’s arrived in late afternoon, the light filtering down from the canopy a rich gold pooling brilliantly on the forest floor beneath gaps in the branches above. She’d had to place the _Falcon_ down in a relatively small clearing, as dense forest seemed to make up most of the landscape—not just in this area, but on this entire hemisphere of the _planet_ , from what she’d been able to tell from above. Indeed, trees are all she can see in every direction.

 

With no real way to know which way to go, Rey closes her eyes, letting the buzz of life wash over her. This forest is _old_ , so much so that the trees around her almost seem to whisper to each other through the Force, but in no language she can understand. She opens herself further, letting her senses fill with birdsong, with the chattering of curious animals, with the caress of wind through leaves and the burbling of water over rocks. She feels the sun baking the dirt, the damp chill of caverns deep below, the slow creep of crystal and ore forming within rock.

 

But she doesn’t feel him. It shouldn’t be a surprise; for a year now, she hasn’t felt him. No visitations, no mysterious surges of emotion, no physical sensations originating from somewhere outside herself. This was what they had agreed upon—a closed bond, no contact. And for a year, it had been so.

 

Until last night. Until her dream.

 

Perhaps he’d only abandoned the tracker here. Perhaps he’d been here months ago and left it behind—or maybe he’d tossed the thing and it ended up here by chance, and he’d never even been here at all. That prospect shouldn’t turn her stomach as much as it does.

 

A year of silence between them, a year of healing and peace for the galaxy, and Rey had thought she’d been fine. But one dream had brought their connection roaring back to life for a few brilliant, searing moments—and all of a sudden he wasn’t just in the past, something outside herself that she could forget. He is her phantom limb, still prickling with discomfort.

 

Now that she’s here, she’s hit with an inexplicable _need_ for him to have been here, to at least have the closure of having stood upon the same ground one more time. Not very unlike the way she had needed to return to Jakku just once on her own terms, even though all she had known there was pain.

 

Rey sinks to one knee, splaying a hand across dirt and leaves. Their bond is silent, and yet...something urges her to stay. To go forward. East.

 

She stands, eyes following the upward slope of the landscape, where rocks jut from the soil with increasing frequency between the trees.

 

Looks like she’s in for a bit of a hike, then.

 

* * *

 

Finn had agreed to keep an eye on her students, which is maybe the only reason she isn’t going _completely_ out of her mind with guilt at the moment. Force-sensitivity is new to him as well, but the youngest among the learners still look up to him with something just shy of outright hero worship—and perhaps his inexperience with the Force even adds to that adoration, the idea that a legend of the Resistance is learning alongside them.

 

Very few of her students are actual children, but even for the adults who can easily take care of themselves in her absence, Rey had wanted them to know she hadn’t abandoned them without giving a thought to their well-being.  

 

Her students. Even now the words make her pulse spike in the oddest combination of pride, fear, and guilt. Seven of them, there are now; a group that had slowly attracted members as the Resistance began its relief effort around the galaxy in the aftermath of war.

 

Rey had tried her best to emphasize that this would not be like the Jedi Order of old, that all of them would be learning and growing side-by-side—perhaps most _especially_ her. But though she’d successfully quashed the idea of being called _master_ , the small group of pupils inevitably looked to her for guidance, still thought of her her as their leader.

 

She’s the last Jedi, after all. The one who convinced Luke Skywalker to make his last stand. The one who brought the Resistance back from the brink of ruin, who fought and destroyed the First Order.

 

Even though she’d failed to fulfill the one duty everyone had expected from her: to put an end to Kylo Ren.

 

Rey is almost thankful for the chill now as she climbs steadily upwards. The hill isn’t steep, but the incline is long and slow, and there is no clear path. She walks for half an hour, stepping over rocks and winding her way between trees. The endless forest is beautiful, to be sure, but her stomach clenches tighter and tighter the further she walks with no sign of any change in her surroundings. How long can she really stay here looking?

 

As the ground begins to even out below her feet, Rey knows she ought to be happy she’s finally cresting the hill—after all, a high vantage point will help her to take stock of the surrounding area. But as miles of forest open up below her for inspection, the magnificent reds and yellows glimmering like hot embers as a breeze stirs the branches around her, her eyes are suddenly blurring.

 

She’s done this before, far too many times, and it isn’t _fair_ . She’s spent so damn much time _looking_ for something held just out of her reach that she can’t even appreciate the beauty around her. She may as well be back in the desert, digging in the sand, hoping to find the next piece of scrap to keep herself alive just a little bit longer—just long enough to find the next one, and the next one, and the _next_ —

 

That’s how it had started. Her dream. Admittedly, that part wasn’t irregular; fifteen-odd years trapped there means Rey still dreams of Jakku often, but she counts it a fair trade to fall asleep on a full stomach and to dream of the desert rather than the other way around. She’d been digging in the sand, trying to unearth some prize sure to win her more than the usual scant handful of portions, something that might feed her for a month—

 

—And then the dream had changed, a familiar, long-silent presence in the Force suddenly blazing hot and bright beneath the dune. _He_ was down there, she knew it, and he was suffocating, unable to free himself. Though Rey dug frantically, sand kept sifting down from all sides, filling in any space she managed to clear. All the while his presence beneath her grew more and more faint. Finally, she’d managed to dig down deep enough to _feel_ something—a hand, weakly grasping—

 

She’d woken with a gasp, her bed soaked with sweat despite the cool night air drifting in through the window of her cabin. His end of the bond was silent once more.   

 

It had taken her only a little over an hour to pack some supplies, to wake Finn and try not to show as much panic as she was truly feeling as she explained to him that there was somewhere she needed to go, _urgently,_ but not to worry. Foolishly, she’d spent a little of that time cobbling together an excuse for Chewie. The utterly false reason for needing the _Falcon_ that she’d cooked up had died on her lips the moment he’d looked at her, his inscrutable eyes reflecting the crackling fire he often tended late into the night.

 

 _Coming back?_ he had asked her, before she’d even opened her mouth.

 

“Of course,” Rey had told him.

 

_Alone?_

 

To that, she had no answer.

 

 _Go_ , he’d urged. _And be careful. That ship’s too old to go through any more major repairs._

 

Sometimes, Rey isn’t sure she’s the one among them who is most in tune with the Force.

 

 _The Force_ , she thinks bitterly, the wind pulling strands of hair loose from her braid. Always so ready with the nightmarish, prophetic dreams, then not so much as a damned hint as soon as she’d gone where it wanted her to go.

 

Edging on desperation, Rey tries her end of the bond again, giving it power, urgency. It’s more than quiet between them, she realizes. Not the silence of an empty room, but a brick wall that her senses slam into.

 

What allows her to regain control of the frantic beating of her heart is the certainty that she’d have _felt_ him die. The other person didn’t even need to be connected to the Force for that. Leia had known the moment Han was gone, she’d told Rey so herself, and Han had been about as Force sensitive as a sack of potatoes. Leia’s words, of course.

 

Not that she and Ben had been anything like— _were_ anything like—well—

 

Nevermind that.

 

 _Please_ , she thinks, staring out over the miles of forest, extending her senses nearly as far as they can go. _Please, give me something._

 

It’s silence that she gets back, for so long that she sinks to her knees, ignoring the bite of pebbles and stones in the rocky hilltop soil, unable to hold back her exhaustion and despair any longer.

 

But then a flutter of movement catches her eye—a white shape that streaks over her head, so that she nearly trips over herself scrambling around to follow it with her eyes.

 

The bird alights on one of the lower branches of the tree behind her, a diminutive creature with a soft, rounded body, feathers of cream and soft gold, and—stranger still—a crest of magnificent bright green to match its luminescent eyes. The bird blinks down at Rey, its dangling tail swishing gently as they take each other in. There’s far too much intelligence in those eyes to mistake it for just any average bird.

 

Rey barely has time to get to her feet before it takes wing, soaring off down the other side of the hill.

 

“Hey!” she yelps, a little bit helplessly, and tears off after it.  

 

 

* * *

 

 

Rey tracks the bird for what must be miles, moving at an utterly punishing clip. The effort of keeping pace with the creature as it weaves through the air above her compounded by the uneven terrain leaves her face shining with sweat, her lungs burning as she tries to suck in enough air to keep herself going.

 

Rey’s stomach drops as she spots the incline of another hill in their path—her knees are already beginning to quiver with the threat of giving out on the stretch of relatively flat ground she’s on now, which means there’s no way she’ll be able to make it up _that_ without resorting to propelling herself forward with the Force. She’d been hoping to conserve her energy on that front for when she found Ben, and whatever dangers might have befallen him.   

 

To Rey’s great relief, her companion makes a sharp left at the last moment, leading her alongside the hill rather than up it, until the ground begins to dip downward again. And then, through the trees, she sees it.

 

A creek cuts through the valley at the bottom of the incline, greenish water trickling over rocks as it rushes gently past.

 

Beside it, on a clear patch of land where the ground flattens out once more, is a cabin.

 

Rey surges forward so quickly that her heel slips, sending a cascade of rocks and dirt down the incline as she begins to slide downhill on her backside. She regains her footing after a few meters, but the rest of her descent is hardly any more graceful. To carefully scale down the hill would be to do so slowly and cautiously—gravity pulls her down the slope with a scrambling lack of control hardly befitting a Jedi, but at least it’s _fast._

  

The cabin is fairly primitive, a simple structure of logs hardly bigger than a storage shed, and a roof shingled with what looks to be strips of bark. It’s hard for Rey to decide if it looks _new_ , but it certainly isn’t overgrown or falling apart. In fact, it looks fairly well cared for, the roof speckled with patches of a slightly different color, as though the shingles in those spots had been replaced.

 

A ring of stones out front encircles the ashen remains of a campfire. Rey’s heart leaps into her throat as she catches a faint whiff of smoke—there’d been a fire here _recently_ , maybe even within the last day cycle.

 

“Ben Solo!” she demands, her voice aimed firmly at the door of the hut. She waits one minute, then two. No answer comes from behind it. She approaches and lays a hand on the wood planks; not a construction that would lend itself well to security, but still, nicely sanded and fitted to the frame with precision. It swings inward with no resistance.

 

The interior is dim in the fading light as afternoon yields to evening, but it’s just one room, and Rey can tell at first glance that it’s unoccupied. She whirls around, eyes desperately seeking the bright spot of white feathers that had led her thus far. Spotting her guide nestled on a branch in a tree across the water, Rey spreads her arms out wide.

 

“He isn’t here!”

 

The bird ruffles indignantly, shifting its weight from one leg to another before hunkering down again with purpose.

 

“I—” Rey begins again, seriously weighing the pros and cons of arguing with what is very probably an entity of the Force, but then her eyes slide down the length of the tree.

 

There she sees a dark shape, slumped against the base on the other side of the trunk.

 

 _No, no, no._ It’s a steady chant in her head as she charges across the creek, crashing through the shallow water that trickles over the rocks. She’d come prepared to face down any manner of nightmarish creatures, or perhaps a group of bounty hunters who had somehow caught wind of the former Supreme Leader’s whereabouts, yet somehow, seeing his lifeless body collapsed mere meters from his own dwelling is infinitely more terrifying than any of those prospects.

 

That he’d been so close, and still hadn’t made it—

 

“Ben,” she demands again as she splashes on to the opposite bank, distantly surprised by the way her voice gets caught up in her throat.

 

She falls to her knees as soon as she’s close enough—and it _is_ him, alright, odd as it is to see him in civilian clothes for the first time rather than his severe uniform black. But there isn’t time to itemize all the differences in his appearance, not when the most beguiling of them is an absence of visible wounds. No blood, no cuts, not even any bruises that she can see.

 

Rey reaches out to lay two fingers beneath his jaw and _gasps_. Her worry had been that he would be cold, the life fading from him or already gone—but his skin is almost painfully hot to the touch, his pulse a rapid flutter beneath her fingertips. A relief and a horror all its own.

 

It’s then that she notices his hands loosely clasped over a spot on his side, as though he’d been clutching it before he collapsed. Rey cautiously lifts his hands away from the spot, finding them disturbingly chilled in comparison to the rest of him. The material of his shirt is completely unmarred beneath them, so she sucks in a breath before tugging the hem of the cloth free from the waist of his pants.

 

All at once, the problem becomes clear. The spot he’d been clutching is bandaged beneath his shirt, and though the gauze is neat and intact, the skin around the area is an angry red and visibly swollen, even a good several inches past the edges of the dressing.

 

 _No bacta_ , Rey marvels. What was he playing at, patching himself up with nothing more than gauze and tape? Even _she’d_ had some access to bacta patches on Jakku, though they were heavily price-gouged. Still, all the scavengers had known that it was better to spend the rations patching up a serious injury properly than to leave it to chance, especially with such little water to spare for washing wounds—even if that meant going hungry for a week or more.

 

 _First things first—get him inside_ . Force only knew how long he’d been out here exposed to the elements, and there was no telling what he’d been doing outdoors when his wound had clearly been festering for a while. He ought to have been _resting_ , surely, but she can’t pretend she’s surprised that the man who’d pounded fiercely on a fresh blaster wound the first time they’d crossed blades would play fast and loose with his own health.

 

Rey eyes him grimly; even using the Force to augmenting her strength, their difference in size presents a serious obstacle to her carrying him. Getting him off the ground with an arm around her shoulders would leave half his body hanging limply and his feet still dragging on the ground, while slinging his whole body across her back would irritate his infected injury far more than necessary.

 

She’s levitated objects before, obviously, but never a _person_ —not in the same way, at least. Pulling an opponent towards her saber, sending them flying backwards with little regard for where they land; both are techniques she’s used countless times. But gently supporting an unconscious body across the width of a creek, especially when she’s already exhausted?

 

Rey draws in a breath. She has to try.

 

Outstretching a hand to summon the Force around him, she finds herself practically quivering with concentration, as if one wrong move might cause him to shatter.

 

 _He’s taken worse than this_ , she reminds herself firmly. Memories of the scars that map his torso float back to her with striking clarity, her eyes lingering on the jagged line running across his face, put there by her own hand. And yet somehow, that doesn’t make it any easier to hear the pained groan that escapes his lips when she eases him off the ground, flat on his back as though she’d conjured an invisible stretcher to lift him.

 

Step by painstaking step she guides him over the forest floor, wary of lifting him too high, unable to guarantee she won’t lose focus and drop him. One of his hands skims the water as Rey steps into the creek, drenching herself up to her shins once more, and he stirs restlessly, eyes moving rapidly beneath their closed lids.

 

By the time they make it to the other side, maintaining that slow, careful pace, Rey realizes that the light is almost completely gone, the sky an enchanting periwinkle that does little to illuminate the shadowy forest below.

 

It occurs to her that the inside of the cabin must be pitch black already. For a moment she considers igniting her saber until she can find the cabin’s source of light—surely he doesn’t just sit in the dark come sunset each day...although honestly, she wouldn’t put it past him—but the possibility of Ben yet again waking up in a dark cabin to someone holding a lightsaber over him might be irreversibly traumatizing in his current state.

 

She eases the door open and floats him through the entry, counting on that last little bit of light from outside to reveal the basic layout of the room, paired with what she remembers from her earlier glance inside. Rey lifts him just high enough to finally, _finally_ deposit him on the bed against the left wall, and then releases her hold on him.

 

She has to go to her knees for a moment, utterly drained from the mental effort on top of her afternoon spent sprinting uphill through the forest. But she forces herself to get back up after only a few seconds—the danger isn’t over simply because she was able to bring him inside.

 

There _is_ a solar lantern on the simple wooden table across the room, thankfully, and Rey illuminates it. It doesn’t light up the whole cabin, but the small radius of brightness it provides is enough to work with.

 

Rey paws methodically through the medpac in her bag. Bacta patches may have been sufficient for his wound when it was fresh, but now, with an infection obviously wracking his system, she wouldn’t be surprised if a full bacta tank immersion was called for.

 

Except even if she were to get him onto the _Falcon_ in the next hour, it might be _days_ before they reached a planet where he he could get the kind of care he needed, to say nothing of the fact that it seemed unlikely the former Supreme Leader would go unrecognized on any world with suitably advanced medical facilities. And even if Rey knew the first thing about Force healing, she doubts she’d be able to muster the energy for it now—so for the moment, bacta patches, fever reducers, and a little quick thinking will have to do.

 

Even still deep in fever-sleep, Ben’s brow etches with pain when she carries the lantern over to his bedside, as though the white light is too harsh for his eyes.

 

“Sorry,” slips out of her mouth before she can think better of it. She feels her face flare hot, though she’s well aware he’s much too far gone to even register her presence.

 

With that, Rey sets to work as best she can. Gently rucking up his shirt, she’s struck again by the boiling temperature of his skin—she’s almost surprised her chilled fingers don’t sizzle in contact with it.

 

The situation beneath the bandage is as she feared. Though the top layer had been clean, the gauze underneath is not; the puffy, inflamed wound has clearly been weeping from infection for some time. From the looks of things, he’d tried to stitch himself up after some kind of accident, and either he’d done a poor job of sterilizing the procedure, or the wound had been too deep for a few stitches to suffice long-term.

 

A clicking sound just as she lays the bacta patch over the area makes Rey look up in alarm. His _teeth_ are chattering, she realizes—and it’s the strangest feeling that spears through her then, looking down at those pale, drawn features, his closed eyelids twitching and fluttering as he shivers.

 

It feels wrong to see him this way, so vulnerable, somehow even more so than the last time they’d met when he’d gone to his knees and begged her to finally end it.    

 

“Hold on,” she whispers to him. “You’re not done, yet.”


	2. Chapter 2

Rey is dozing in her chair when movement from the bed suddenly jolts her awake. She can’t have caught more than an hour or two of rest, even as exhausted as she is from the several hours spent at Ben’s bedside battling the symptoms of fever. It feels not unlike all the times she’d been forced to sleep behind enemy lines on a longer mission, unable to truly relax even with someone else keeping watch.

 

Ben’s eyes are finally open, though just barely. Blearily, he reaches for the damp cloth draped over his forehead, brow furrowed in discomfort.

 

“Hey, hey, don’t move,” Rey intervenes, surging forward to catch his wrist so she can gently pull his hand away. Her own hands are shaking slightly, simultaneously unable to believe her good luck that he’s survived these few hours under her care and terrified at the prospect of him being recovered enough to finally realize she’s here.

 

“Cold,” is all he groans, though, barely able to form that single word with his cracked lips.

 

“I know,” she murmurs, doing her best to keep a calm tone in spite of the slight nervous quaver in her voice she can’t shake, “But you’ve got to get your temperature down.”

 

Suddenly more reluctant to touch him now that he’s semi-conscious, Rey gingerly tugs the thin blanket higher up so that it covers everything below his neck, hoping that will do something to dispel the chill he must be feeling in spite of the infection burning beneath his skin. And it just seems...well, more _proper_ , she supposes.

 

Rey looks up from the blanket and nearly jumps. Ben is staring at her with what must be as much concentration as he can muster in this state, his eyes heavy-lidded but fixed on her, as though he’s having difficulty bringing her into focus. As she leans closer to him, the braid lying over one shoulder swings forward.

 

“Mom?” he whispers, voice painfully thin, and Rey feels her stomach plummet nearly to her feet.

 

“No, Ben,” she tries to break it to him gently, in spite of the lump that has instantly formed in her throat, “It—it’s me. Rey.”

 

“Rey,” he repeats, and her name is little more than a rasp in his throat. Her heart jumps, but from his tone it’s clear he’s not actually connecting her words to reality. His gaze shifts to the ceiling. “Where is she?”

 

“I’m _here_ , Ben,” she tries again, but the confusion on his face is quite plain, his eyes barely open, brow still screwed up in distress.

 

Rey sighs, moving just slightly out of her seat to retrieve the canteen from her bag. It’ll be a while before he’s in any state to tell her what happened to him, and she needs to keep him hydrated in the meantime. But before she’s even halfway out of her chair, his arm shoots out with surprising speed and grips the hem of her tunic.

 

When her gaze snaps to him in alarm, she finds him staring intently at the fabric bunched in his fist, as though too exhausted to try and find her face again. He’s mumbling something that sounds like, “Don’t—don’t leave again—” and honestly, Rey has no idea if he’s talking to _her_ , or if he still thinks she’s Leia, or someone else entirely. The words pierce her heart regardless of who they’re meant for, filled as they are with naked despair.

 

Biting her lip, Rey manages to pry her tunic out of his fist, but his hand immediately begins to grasp for a replacement. It scrambles to squeeze hers with such renewed desperation that she decides just to keep hold of it as she sinks to the side of the bed for her canteen.

 

Heart suddenly in her throat, Rey tries to focus on the tightness of that grasp rather than the identity of its owner, or the memory of the scant few other times she’s come into direct contact with this hand. It must be a good sign that his strength hasn’t faded entirely.    

 

“I won’t leave,” she promises, a little more softly than she’d intended, and she has to clear her throat a little so that her next words come out strong and clear. “Now...now hang on a second. You need to drink, if you can.”

 

But even this incoherent confusion seems to have been only a brief return to lucidity. His eyes are still open when she looks up from her satchel, but his look is utterly glazed and aimed back up at the ceiling, the vise-like grip on her hand now slackened.

 

Slowly, Rey disentangles her fingers from his, a strange feeling of disappointment settling in her gut. It had been nice not to feel completely on her own for the first time in nearly a day, even if her company had been a babbling, fever-stricken former adversary.

 

Yes, that must be why.  

 

Carefully, she’s able to coax him to raise his head and accept a few cautious sips of water in his semi-consciousness, though just this small effort seems to use up what’s left of his energy. He has returned to that restless fever-sleep again by the time his head drops to the pillow. He doesn’t look particularly peaceful, but his breaths are even and deep.

 

Force. Rey stands from her chair and crosses the room on shaky legs. She’s been running on pure adrenaline since she left Naboo, focusing on nothing more than _getting_ here and answering the distress call that had echoed from him in the Force. But now that she’s here, now that he’s at least _somewhat_ stable—though hardly out of the woods—it occurs to her that she has no idea what will happen once he’s really awake and lucid enough to realize she’s here.

 

It’s been over a year since their last meeting, and they’d parted on such strange, uncertain terms. They’d closed off their respective sides of the bond to the best of their abilities, but now that she’s finally in front of him again, Rey realizes that he must have gone a step further. She’s reminded of her time on Ahch-To, when she’d reached out for all the life signatures on the island and found one notable absence in the Force in spite of the fact that Luke was right in front of her—the same kind of conspicuous absence she feels now.

 

Ben has cut himself off from the Force. Completely.

 

Does he even realize how closely this path mirrors Luke’s, she wonders? Would it enrage him to realize he has followed in the footsteps of the uncle he detested?

 

Rey rolls her neck in a fruitless attempt to work out the kinks formed there from her brief doze in the chair, fingers digging into a knot in her shoulder. She’ll need to find somewhere marginally more comfortable to sleep next time, although this brief encounter has left her so wired that she isn’t sure exactly _when_ that might be.

 

Crossing to the small window by the table, Rey stares out at the glittering black stream, considering the situation. There are definitely some supplies on the _Falcon_ that would prove useful, and a walk back to the ship would be much more direct now that she knows where she’s going...but by her estimate it would likely still take nearly two hours. She could fly the ship on the way back if she found an area nearby to land it, but there’s no telling how long it might take to scout for a clearing. Possibly much longer than would be safe to leave Ben in his current condition.

 

And...it would perhaps be a little cruel, even if he remains stable. _Don’t leave,_ he’d been begging, apparently out of his mind with fright at the idea of being left alone.

 

But she’ll need those extra supplies if she’s going to be here for a few days...

 

It’s then that she realizes there’s something else on the table besides the solar lamp she’d found earlier. A stylus of some kind rests in an angled holder, accompanied by a small jar filled with a solid cake of material; her fingertip comes away stained black when she dips it in to check the contents. Ink. Beside it, a simple leatherbound volume of some kind filled with _real_ paper pages.

 

Rey casts a look over at Ben’s sleeping form, feeling her eyebrows creep upward. He’s certainly living rough out here—the utter lack of tech she’s encountered so far almost rivals the simplicity of her hovel on Jakku—but something about parchment and ink is almost indulgently old-fashioned, a step beyond the simple, rustic necessities scattered about the cabin.

 

Leaving a note might cover her bases, Rey thinks—she could let him know where she’d gone without waking him up from much-needed sleep. She reaches for the book on the table in search of a blank scrap of paper she can scrawl on, but startles as it falls open in her hands, revealing pages upon pages filled with precise black handwriting.

 

It’s too dark to make out any of the words, but Rey snaps it shut at once with another shocked look over at the bed. There’s no question that she’s found something intensely personal to him, something he can’t ever have anticipated being found by another person in the depths of his isolation.

 

She’d had access to Kylo Ren’s most private thoughts without consent once before, and she can’t say she’s keen to repeat the experience. Carefully, she returns it to its rightful place in spite of the intense curiosity making her heart pound in her chest.

 

They can get by on the supplies in her pack for a day or so more, she decides.

 

 

* * *

 

At dawn, Rey stirs from her new resting spot, having spent the remainder of the night curled up on the floor along the wall opposite the bed, her satchel serving as a makeshift pillow. She sits up with a shiver—though she’d thrown her poncho over herself as a blanket, it had done little to warm her through the night.

 

First light has finally begun to illuminate the room with a dim glow. Rey rakes a hand through her hair, left unbound for sleep, as she takes in the figure on the bed, motionless aside from the rise and fall of his chest. Eventually, she gets to her feet and crosses back over to Ben’s bedside; she’ll need to change that bacta patch and take a look at how his wound is progressing.

 

But as she reaches to push aside the thin blanket, a hand whips out to snatch up her wrist once more. This time, when she shoots an alarmed look at him, his eyes are _wide_ open and locked directly on hers.

 

“You,” he declares, almost accusingly. And then he moves to sit up, hands bracing to lift himself to his elbows—but Rey is there in an instant, one hand pressing flat on his chest to keep him down as he continues to stare up at her in shock.  

 

“Do _not_ ,” she emphasizes, “sit up. Not until I’ve checked how much that’s healed.”

 

“What—?” he begins, lifting his head again to try and peer down at himself. He’s barely moved at all before he winces, pulling in a rattling gasp of pain and hands flying to the wound on his side.

 

“How bad?” Rey asks, upon this obvious display of agony. Shouldn’t his pain have lessened by now? Had it already been too late for the bacta to make a difference? She moves to gently part his hands from his side so she can look at the bandage.

 

“It...hurts,” he manages, a little breathlessly. The fact that he can even answer her question makes it clear his earlier haze of confusion has lifted a great deal.

 

But apparently, he doesn’t remember waking earlier to find her here, as his gaze hasn’t gotten any less wild since first opening his eyes. “ _What_ are you doing here?” he demands, once he’s recovered a bit of breath.

 

There’s something about the utter bewilderment in his tone that makes heat rise in her face, as though she’d committed some outrageous faux-pas by showing up.

 

“You were dying,” Rey says, more than a bit defensively. “I saw it. I _felt_ it. I couldn’t just…” she trails off.

 

At first, he just stares at her. “That shouldn’t be possible,” he says finally, voice still a bit weak from his shock of pain.

 

She feels bitterness rise up in her chest, and though he’s clearly in no state for much discussion, she can’t stop herself from spitting out, “Because you cut yourself off from the Force?”

 

Rey sees his jaw tense, but he says nothing to deny it, looking fiercely away from her for the first time. She swallows a thing or two more she wants to say to him, conscious of the fact that he’d been so close to death only a few hours ago. Instead, she flips the blanket back a little more aggressively than is probably necessary.

 

“Like I said,” Rey finally continues, a bit stiffly, “The Force reached out to me, somehow. So I came. What _happened_ to you?”    

 

He keeps his head turned away, and for a moment she thinks he isn’t going to answer. But finally he grumbles to the wall: “An accident.”

 

“And you just sewed yourself up with some spare thread? What are you doing out here with no proper medical supplies? No bacta?” Rey can’t keep the disapproval out her voice. Survival takes _planning_ , it takes _work_.

 

Her consternation is something to hold on to as she pushes up the hem of his shirt, telling herself it’s no different now than when he was passed out. She keeps her touch light and careful as she begins to lift the corners of the bacta patch away from his skin. Though Ben keeps his head angled away from her, staring determinedly at the wall beside the bed, she’s positive that his eyes flick reluctantly back to her once or twice.

 

Luckily, the wound beneath the bacta patch actually _is_ looking better—though it isn’t as dramatic an improvement as it could have been, had it not already been festering for days. The area is only half as swollen as before, though the wound itself has only begun to close a little. That he’s now conscious and able to understand her questions means that his fever must be at least somewhat lessened. It seems the bacta is working from the inside out.

 

“My ship is out of commission,” he says, each word apparently an effort, “I ran out of some crucial supplies. It was this or nothing.”

 

“Out of commission,” Rey echoes, dumbstruck. “You’ve just been _stuck_ out here? For how long?”

 

“Does it matter?” he asks. He might be going for grim, but it comes out rather tired. He’s coherent, certainly, but nowhere close to healed.

 

“Of—of course it _matters_ ,” Rey sputters, “You weren’t meant to hole up out here forever like Lu—”

 

“ _Fuck_ ,” Ben curses quite vehemently, shocking Rey into silence before she can finish. He buries his face in the crook of his arm, apparently half in pain and half in anger. “I can’t be in the company of another living being for _five minutes_ without hearing that _name_ —”

 

“I’ve been here a lot longer than five minutes,” she snaps, “Now hold still for a second.”

 

But he winces as she goes to apply the new bacta patch, forcing her to pull it back at the last second to avoid sticking it only halfway on to the wound. “I said keep still!” she practically yelps, “You’re going to aggravate it.”

 

He lifts the arm away from his face to glare at her, dark eyes more piercing than usual against his deathly pallor, but says nothing. It’s hardly the first time he’s refused to speak to her, but it _is_ the first time there’s been no undercurrent of emotion or thought whispered to her across the bond to fill in the blanks as to his state of mind. The bond has been silent for nearly a year, and yet to _see_ him right there in front of her and still feel nothing, not even a trace of his Force signature…it leaves her strangely cold.

 

Rey grasps for something, _anything_ else to fill the sudden emptiness she feels in her chest—and then there it is. Anger. Blessed, familiar anger.

 

“I didn’t realize _saving your life_ was such an insult. So sorry.” Rey sets her jaw as she lays the bacta patch on, then pushes away from the bed roughly, snatching up her satchel. She stares down at him, expecting some kind of response. But instead, he simply turns his face away again without a word.

 

Fine. _Fine,_ then. Rey slings the straps of her bag over her shoulders and strides towards the door, grasping the leather strap serving as its handle before something pulls her up short.

 

“Next time,” she says, eyes fixed firmly on the patterns in the wood grain, “I’ll know not to intrude.”

 

Then, with a jerk on the handle, she is five brisk steps out into the crisp dawn. She makes no effort to stop the door from banging shut behind her.  

 

* * *

 

Rey walks for nearly half an hour, scouting for any clearings that might be large enough to land the _Falcon_ in as she walks a wide circle around Ben’s cabin. The area is too densely wooded, though: the gargantuan trees are clustered so thickly in places that their brilliantly-colored leaves block out the sky entirely. There’s no doubt the forest is beautiful, but Rey suspects she’d have to _blast_ her way through the sturdy, interwoven branches forming the canopy if she wanted to get through from above.

 

Rey crosses her arms across her chest as she steps over a massive root jutting out of the soil, doing her best to shrug off the early morning chill. She’s put on her poncho _and_ her arm wraps, but every now and then the breeze blows a little colder than expected, piercing through the weave of the fabric. She’d tried putting her hair up like usual, but with the wind chilling the back of her neck, she ends up leaving it hanging loose around her face for the trace amount of warmth it can provide.

 

The fact that she’s _fuming_ does nothing to warm her up, unfortunately.

 

The worst part, she decides, is that she _knows_ a reception like that wouldn’t have stung so much if she hadn’t been so stupidly gentle with him through the night. What had she been _thinking?_ Trying to comfort him, holding his kriffing _hand_ —he didn’t seem to remember any of it, at least. Thank the Force for small miracles.

 

There would be none of that from here on out, of course. She would get him on the mend, see to this business of him apparently being _stranded_ out here, and then take her leave.

 

Admitting to herself that she had ever considered any other possible outcome to this excursion makes her cheeks heat with shame.

 

Kylo Ren, Ben Solo—no matter what name he goes by now, there’s no doubt that he will be a wanted man for years to come. Possibly even for the rest of his life. But Rey had hoped that some time away from the rest of the galaxy would help to give old wounds a chance to heal. Only then would he be able to get his head on straight, and maybe, eventually, begin the difficult work of atonement.

 

Rey can’t pretend that she knows what such a task might entail—but she feels fairly certain that cutting himself off the Force is a step in the _opposite_ direction.   

 

Having made as wide of a circuit around the unfamiliar area as she dares, Rey sets a reluctant course back to the cabin, quietly hoping that Ben will have fallen back asleep by now. The odds that their next exchange will be any more pleasant than the first don’t seem high.

 

She emerges from the treeline slightly downstream from Ben’s cabin, raising a hand to shield her eyes against the low angle of early morning sun. At first, she isn’t sure exactly what looks off about the small structure—and then, as she passes beneath a shadow of a branch which cuts the glare of light, she realizes the strange shape leaning against the side of the cabin is _Ben._

 

“What are you _doing?_ ” Rey cries, breaking into a run.

 

Ben’s head comes up with a snap at her exclamation, his uninjured side leaning heavily against the wall, one hand white-knuckled with the effort of clutching the logs for support. To Rey’s surprise, the expression on his face isn’t angry—at least not at first. No, his eyes are definitely wide as they take in her approach, though by the time she gets to him his dark brow has furrowed again.

 

“What the hell are you doing out of bed?” she demands again, “Have lost your mind?”

 

He glares at her defiantly, in spite of the sheen of perspiration on his forehead from the sheer effort of remaining on his feet. “You expected me to lie there waiting on you to have a change of heart?”

 

Rey stares right back at him. “A change of h—” she begins, utterly bewildered, before cutting off in realization. “You thought I _left?”_

 

“You did leave,” he points out bitterly, voice strained through gritted teeth.

 

“To cool _off_ ,” Rey explains, horrorstruck. “I wasn’t about to get back in my ship and leave you to rot!”

 

Through his mask of pain, Ben manages to convey a look of such blatant disbelief that she actually takes a step backwards in shock.

 

“That’s what you think of me?” she gapes at him, “That I’d leave you here, helpless?”

 

“I am not,” he growls, “ _Helpless._ ” At this, Ben shoves himself away from the wall, giving an agonized grunt muffled by his refusal to unclench his jaw. Rey can only look on in horror. He’d barely been able to handle the pain of lifting his head to examine his own wound earlier; even with fresh bacta on it, there was no way the pain could have lessened that much in such a short amount of time. She hadn’t even been gone for a full hour.

 

“I survived Snoke’s training—-” he grits out, and clutching the wound in his side, he takes a slow, lurching step forward, “I survived his punishments—,” another step, and another, “I—I can—”

 

But he begins to plummet sideways before he can tell her what else it is he can supposedly survive. In spite of everything he’s said to her, Rey is there in a flash, holding him up on his good side before his shoulder can impact the wall of the cabin again. She stumbles for a moment under the weight of his broad frame, teetering precariously at the odd angle she’d caught him at before finding her footing again.

 

“Come on,” she murmurs, and he actually allows her to sling his arm around her shoulders and begin to lead him to the door—-though whether he’s finally accepting the help or if he’s just too weak to protest, Rey isn’t sure.

 

Inside, they’re almost to the bed when Ben jerks away from her grasp, stumbling into the chair beside it rather than allowing himself to be eased down onto the mattress.

 

“You need to lie down!” she tells him, but he’s shaking his head before the words are even fully out of her mouth.

 

“Too hard to get up again,” he says, and despite the fact that his little excursion has left him pale and winded, he looks prepared to try and fight her off if she tries to move him. Rey very nearly scrubs a hand down her face in exasperation. Accepting defeat for the moment, she settles for crossing her arms over her chest.

 

“Is there a reason you’re trying your absolute hardest to die in the middle of nowhere?” Rey snaps, glowering down at him.

 

Eyes fixed on a point on the wall over her shoulder, Ben grumbles, “I do not need to be _nursed_.”

 

“Is that right?” she asks, “Because from what I can tell, I was about five minutes away from finding you half-dead under a tree for the second time in less than a day. What were you _doing_ out there?”

 

He seems intent on trying to ignore her, but Rey steps into his eyeline with determination, forcing him to meet her gaze. “I assure you that I’m not leaving before I want to unless you can stand up and make me,” she tells him, “And I’m pretty sure that’ll be _days_ from now.”

 

The tips of his ears turn a dull red, but this time, he doesn’t look away. “As I said, I thought you were gone.”

 

For a moment it looks like that’s all he’s going to say, but Rey raises her eyebrows, urging him on.

 

“I needed to eat,” he finishes, with palpable reluctance.

 

Rey eyes him before scrutinizing the perimeter of the room. She’d taken notice of the relatively bare nature of the cabin, of course, but now that she isn’t half-panicked and in the middle of saving his life, it begins to dawn on her just how _little_ there is in here.Other than the bed and the table, there’s a cloak hanging from a peg by the door, a shovel propped against the wall, and a metal toolbox with a battered cookpot sitting atop it. But nothing in the way of food storage, as far as she can tell.

 

“You don’t have food?” Rey asks, perturbed. At once, she pulls the satchel off her back and produces a handful of ration packets, but Ben shakes his head.

 

“I have a shed, back a ways behind the cabin,” he tells her. “There’s meat drying there. Some foraged plants as well. Those might be—preferable.” He selects the word with care, but he can’t quite disguise a hint of distaste in his eyes at the appearance of the rations. The expression with which he surveys the vacuum-sealed packets nearly floors her with its familiarity: the reluctant yet resigned look of someone who has subsisted on such fare for far too long.

 

But more importantly—

 

His earlier, stilted comments had made it clear that he’d been here for a not-insignificant amount of time. The cabin, she’d reasoned, could have been here before Ben, a lucky thing for him to stumble across. But it sounded as though he’d _built_ this shed he was talking about, which meant it was possible he’d built the cabin as well. And if he’d run out of supplies to the point that he’d built himself a bloody _homestead_ and was almost completely living off the land...

 

“Ben,” Rey begins slowly, “How long have you been stuck out here?”   

 

That serious face regards her in silence for a moment, his lips pressed thin, as if deciding something. Apparently, he has finally reached the conclusion that brushing her off has failed so far as a plan of action.

 

Seeming to brace himself, he answers in a carefully neutral tone: “About five standard months.”

  
And then there’s a _clunk_ as her satchel and the ration packets simultaneously hit the floor.


	3. Chapter 3

It happened like this, like hardly more than a blip in the historical archives: Supreme Leader Ren reigned for a total of thirty-one standard days. Apparently, his leadership style had not been received well among the upper echelon of the First Order. 

 

The Resistance might not have stood a chance against the united front of the First Order—especially not once Leia had passed away mere weeks later, weakened from her exposure in space and badly grieving the loss of her twin—but the schisms among the enemy's ranks that began forming after the incident on Crait were an unexpected boon. 

 

Some, fearing his power or driven by the mindless obedience that told them to respect the chain of command no matter how it had been inherited, fell in line behind the new Supreme Leader. But Ren had never been popular during his days as Snoke’s attack dog, and the majority aligned themselves against him, throwing in with General Hux. After the initial coup, the First Order had splintered into dozens of quarreling pieces as allegiances shifted and an outbreak of greed and ambition ripped through High Command like a virus. As the First Order diminished its own numbers with infighting, the Resistance had slipped in, igniting rebellions on planets across the galaxy to push the fractured remnants of the regime to their breaking point.

 

The plan that night was almost shockingly simple: the Resistance would mount an assault designed to draw out as many of Hux’s soldiers as possible while Rey led a small team aboard his ship. They’d received promising intelligence that Hux’s faction was stretched so thin that his flagship often became startlingly empty when engaged in major assaults—too many officers, not enough grunts to enact their usual tactics of overwhelming opponents with sheer numbers. But it soon became clear that the Resistance had not been the only ones to receive that tip. 

 

The ship wasn’t just empty of the fighting forces; Hux and all his officers were gone as well, chased off by another enemy judging by the look of the deserted corridors. The walls were riddled with blaster marks, nearly all the escape pods ejected from their bays. 

 

Rey had ignited her saber before they even entered the bridge, already sensing what— _ who _ — they’d find. Kylo had whirled on them as they approached, wild rage etched across his features so that he scarcely looked human in the red glow of his saber, which he’d been using to savage the control panel behind him in retaliation for Hux’s escape. 

 

He’d flung out a hand as Rey raised her saber defensively, and she’d braced herself to counter—but with a jolt of surprised, realized she wasn’t the target. Each member of her backup team sailed backwards instead, knocked off their feet by the Force as they were propelled back into the corridor they’d just come from. Once they were clear of the entry, the doors had sealed shut to cut off their access to the room.  

 

_ Just you, _ Kylo seemed to be saying, chest heaving as he pointed the crackling beam of his saber at her. And she’d run forward to meet him.

 

Rey could tell there was something off about him from the moment their blades crossed. They’d met directly in battle only a brief handful of times since she’d left him broken in Snoke’s throne room, but it was enough experience to know that his movements were somehow sloppier than usual—though his desperation and strength were dangerous enough on their own. He was leaning on the Force more than she’d ever seen from him before, using it in turns to knock her back and drag her forward towards his blade, but she always seemed to get control just in time to avoid being impaled. 

 

“What are you  _ doing?”  _ she’d screeched at him, after a few minutes of this back-and-forth, knocking him back with a Force push of her own. It was like he was  _ playing _ with her, batting her around to show her how  _ easily _ he could defeat her, to scare her, as if trying to make her desperate enough to—

 

To—

 

Force. He wanted her to  _ kill _ him. 

 

“Come on!” he shouted as he scrambled unsteadily to his feet, apparently enraged by the sight of her just standing there, staring at him in horror.

 

Stopping Kylo Ren was the duty everyone expected of her in the end, especially now that Leia was gone. She didn’t  _ want _ to kill him, though, even considering everything he’d done. Because what would happen then? The Dark Side would be driven back, for a time—-just to rise again as it always did, even more dangerous and more desperate to thrive.    

 

Ideally, she’d have been able to subdue and capture him, bring him back to the Resistance as a prisoner to face trial for his crimes. But if she were being honest with herself, she knew that a trial was likely to be nothing more than a formality before an inevitable execution, especially with Leia no longer there to inspire even the barest touch of mercy on his behalf. 

 

Surely Kylo himself was well aware of this, of what awaited him should he be captured by any of the dozens of enemies who were closing in around him with each passing day. His behavior made his opinion of such an end quite clear. Apparently, he’d rather Rey put a saber through his chest and be done with it than wait to see how long Hux or the Resistance intended to play with their food. The thought chilled her.

 

He rushed her again, swinging at her in two haphazard arcs that she dodged much too easily, though she’d left her defenses wide open.

 

“What are you holding back for?” he growled, between more swings that she batted away without returning the attacks, “This is what she wanted, isn’t it? Once she realized her son was—”

 

This, of all things, finally stoked a flare of anger in her, and Rey gave him an almighty  _ push _ with the Force that sent him halfway across the bridge, the crackling red blade in his hand winking out as he went sprawling across the floor. She followed him this time, pinning the wrist of his saber hand beneath her boot, her own blade leveled at his throat.

 

“Your  _ mother,”  _ Rey spat out, “Died loving you.”

 

He gave no response but to glower up at her. Rey went on, feeling moisture gather in the corners of her eyes.

 

“It was quite hard for her to talk, at the end. She was tired. Tired of  _ fighting _ . But she summoned me to her bedside and she asked me,  _ ‘if there’s a way, will you do it?’” _

 

He had nothing to say to that, either, although his eyes seemed to gain an unnatural shine in the dim light of the abandoned bridge, wild and brimming with the restraint of— _ something _ . Rey pressed her saber infinitesimally closer to his throat, trying to ignore the way her voice trembled as she spoke.

 

“If there was a way to save you, would I do it? After  _ everything _ you’ve done? After all the  _ chances _ you’ve had?” Rey could feel her arm quivering, so tight was her grip on the hilt of her saber. 

 

And then she cut the power to the blade, so that the silvery touch of stars through the transparisteel viewport was all that illuminated them both.  

 

“I told her I would.”

 

He’d surged to his knees then, but rather than attacking, he seized her wrist with both hands and brought the hilt of her unlit saber flush to his chest, directly over his heart.

 

“So do it,” he told her, in a voice so empty with misery that her blood went cold. 

 

“That—that isn’t—”

 

“The only person in the galaxy who doesn’t want me dead is in this room,” he intoned, “My own men will mutiny after this. They’ll sell me to Hux for immunity. This—” his voice seemed to fail him then, though he appeared not to want to allow himself the luxury of breaking down, fury at himself ever-present behind the despair. A moment passed, in which he appeared to be gathering himself. “This is the only way out.”

 

Rey’s heart was pounding so hard in her chest that she felt feverish, almost nauseous. She’d made a promise...but with Leia gone, delivering him to the Resistance meant certain death.

 

Her mouth was so dry she needed to lick her lips before she could speak. 

 

And then she’d whispered, “What if it’s not?”

  
  


* * *

 

“ _ About  _ five months? _ ”  _ Rey exclaims. 

 

“A hundred and seventy-one days,” Ben elaborates, with a stubborn, matter-of-fact sort of tone that makes it clear he’s aware that being more specific is not improving things. “Seventy-two, now, actually.” 

 

Sudden contact between the mattress and the backs of her thighs gives Rey a bit of a jolt, and only then does she realize that she’s sunk onto the edge of the bed in shock.

 

Five months. Five months ago, the Resistance had only just begun putting down roots on Naboo. So many worlds across the galaxy had felt the touch of war in one way or another; in the first months after their victory over Hux, they’d spent most of their time just traveling from planet to planet, lending aid wherever they were able. Five months ago, her group of Force-sensitive students had only been half its current size. With the way her days now seem to move at lightspeed, it feels like half a lifetime ago.

 

And all that time, he’d been here.

 

“You were supposed to contact me in an emergency,” Rey says. “Why the hell didn’t you?”

 

Ben eyes her before answering, as though surprised by her reaction.

 

“It didn’t—” he starts, then winces, having tried to straighten his posture in the chair, “—didn’t seem warranted. Not at first. I had already been here for about a week, and discovered the initial damage when I was preparing to move on. I had plenty of supplies, so I accepted that I would be here for several more days while I made repairs.”

 

He pauses, which makes Rey want to scream in light of how tight-lipped he’s been to this point—-but as he tries to wet his dry lips, she realizes that his delay is because he’s having trouble talking for an extended period of time. She ducks down immediately, detaching her spare canteen from her pack and offering it to him. She’d left water with him earlier, but unsurprisingly, her other canteen lays on the floor by the bed, cap open and apparently drained dry. 

 

Ben accepts the water—not quite graciously, but with none of his previous attitude, either—and tilts it into his mouth with surprising restraint, not caving to the urge to drink too fast. Rey supposes she shouldn’t be surprised. Clearly he must be more well-versed in survival skills than she’d given him credit for, if he’s lasted this long in the middle of nowhere.

 

“The  _ initial _ damage?” Rey prompts him to go on, once it appears he’s had his fill.

 

Ben nods grimly, brushing a drop of water from his lips with the back of his hand. “I concealed the ship in an area with some cover when I arrived, on the off chance anyone flew over. But the vegetation proved to be...aggressive.” 

 

He frowns at the memory, more than a trace of puzzlement on his usually serious features. “It was completely overgrown, more than should be possible in just a few days. Vines creeping into the cannons and exhaust ports and every other gap in the exterior. Some of them had wormed their way in far enough to dislodge some of the wiring. All fairly superficial issues, but it took hours just to clear it all away. I was losing daylight by that point and had to return in the morning to deal with the wiring.”

 

This time when he pauses for a drink, he knocks back the canteen as though he wishes it were something stronger. “By then, it had all grown back. The damage was more severe—and it got worse each time I tried to cut the thing free. Eventually, there was more damage to the internal wiring than I could ever hope to repair with the supplies I had.” 

 

Through the window, the gargantuan trees on the opposite bank of the stream catch Rey’s gaze, their reflections rippling in the shallow water. She recalls the buzz of life she’d heard, the almost-whispers of voiceless beings, the appearance of the strange bird that had guided her to Ben. This was no ordinary forest.

 

“You made it angry,” she realizes aloud, still staring out the window, somewhat in awe.

 

From behind her, Ben huffs. “Spare me the Jedi moralizing—” he begins in a tight voice, ready to argue once again. But then Rey turns back to him, and the combativeness drains from his expression as he reads the lack of anger in her face.

 

“I’m not,” Rey says, with a level of patience that even  _ she  _ doesn’t expect, “Moralizing. Or a Jedi, really, for that matter. I’m just saying...this forest is an  _ ancient _ presence in the Force. If you were closed off from it when you arrived here, it may not have been able to sense you properly—possibly even viewed you as a threat because of that.”

 

“A scholar on ancient entities of the Force, now, are we?” Ben snaps, but Rey doesn’t let herself react the way he wants her to. The scowl on his face is one she’s all too familiar with—one that tells her anything he says to her now is just an effort to distract her from the fact that she’s hit the mark with an accuracy that has him shaken.

 

“Maybe I am,” Rey tells him coolly. “A lot can happen in a year.”

 

He stares at her for a long moment, and though the rest of his expression is carefully guarded, the look in his eyes is something just short of taken aback. Then his gaze drops, dark eyes scanning her seated figure up from the floor as if taking her in anew with those words in mind. She meets that gaze when it reaches hers, holding it steadily even as she feels a bit of heat creep into her cheeks.

 

A lot  _ has _ happened in the past year. Admittedly, discovering all the mysteries of the Force hasn’t been part of it, but nor is she still the girl who’d turned up on Ahch-To knowing scarcely more than  _ it can make things float.  _

 

She’s a teacher, now. She’s a  _ leader.  _ And she will be  _ damned _ if she’ll be tricked into falling into their old patterns, the same way the galaxy has time and time again.

 

“If it wants me gone,” Ben finally says, dryly, _“_ destroying my ship and stranding me here is a strange way to go about making that happen.”  

 

“It helped me to find you,” Rey tells him. “Guided me, when I reached out. Maybe you should try  _ asking _ what it wants.”

 

But once again, he shakes his head; a slow, somber motion that betrays his exhaustion even as he insists upon remaining upright in his chair. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to decipher what the Force wants. It can do as it pleases. I’m done playing along.”

 

“So you’ve given up? Is that it?” Rey gets to her feet now, glaring at him. Deep down, she has to admit to the smallest sense of satisfaction as his eyes widen just slightly in shock. “Is that why you’ve decided to accept your fate as a hermit practically out in Wild Space? Resigned to spend the rest of your life hiding out here while the galaxy rebuilds around you?” 

 

Ben looks at her strangely, then—a far cry from the furious rebuttal she’d been expecting. Brows furrowed in confusion, he regards her warily, as if she’d suddenly switched to blurting out gibberish in the middle of her argument. 

 

“I disappeared,” Ben says slowly, “Because you told me to.” 

 

People often say that realizations  _ dawn _ on them, but such a word is far too gentle for the way the facts of the situation suddenly connect in Rey’s mind, linked at last by this missing piece. It’s more like a bucket of ice water dumped over her head, or the sudden, jolting impact of a missed step on the stairs. His resignation to the situation; his anger toward her and his curt, dismissive answers to her questions. 

 

“I—I didn’t—” she begins, but has to stop herself as he raises an eyebrow in challenge to that statement.

 

“Go now,” he repeats from memory, voice flat as he echoes her words, “Before I change my mind. Get as far away as you can. No contact.”   

 

She  _ had _ told him to disappear. There on the darkened bridge of Hux’s ship, she’d told him to ditch everything traceable, take a ship to the Outer Rim, lay low, and cut the bond so even  _ she _ wouldn’t know where he was without resorting to the tracker. All of this to buy him time while the galaxy healed from the scars of war, so that one day they could figure out his path forward into balance. To keep him  _ alive. _

 

But there had been so little time. He’d needed to go  _ right then _ if he was going to escape both the Resistance members that had boarded with Rey as well as his own mutinous followers. There had been mere minutes for Rey to explain her plan and help him enact it. No time to explain her intentions, her plans for the future. She’d thought those things would come across through their connection—but apparently, he hadn’t reached across the bond to find out. 

 

So in all that rush, Ben had come away with his own assumption: that she was sending him away for good, so that he wouldn’t be  _ her _ problem anymore.

 

And he’d...obeyed her?

 

All of a sudden, her throat feels very tight indeed.

 

If Ben had looked confused before, it’s nothing compared to the way his expression morphs into pure bewilderment tinged with horror as he watches her face through this silent realization. It takes until the edges of her vision begin to swim that it’s because her eyes have abruptly filled with tears.

 

“You—you thought—” she stammers, but finds herself struggling for control of her vocal cords. 

 

A year. A year of his life wasted in misery, spent thinking she’d sent him away to die, all because he assumed his life was worth nothing anymore.

 

“Rey?” he asks warily, eyeing her as though the glassy shine in her eyes is a sign of something much more dire, as if she’s going to explode rather than start crying. 

 

All at once, her name from his lips is just one more thing than she can handle. It’s the first time he’s said it since he’s been properly awake, and to hear it spoke with such trepidation…

 

Rey pivots away from him to face the window, one hand flashing up to scrub the moisture from the corners of her eyes. Her arms come up to cross tightly over her chest, needing that semblance of stability.

 

“I said,” Rey begins, trying hard to ignore the way her constricted voice badly betrays how close she is to losing that modicum of control. She stares hard out the window, trying to focus on something, _ anything _ out there to help her regain her composure. “I said no contact  _ except  _ in an emergency. I gave you the tracker. Why did you think…?”

 

Even with her back turned, the intensity of Ben’s eyes on her is obvious. The nape of her neck prickles uncomfortably. 

 

“You wouldn’t do it yourself,” he says, quietly. “Even though you should have. But I thought...I thought this would be easier for you. For you not to feel like you had a part in it. This way, your hands stay clean.”

 

In spite of the tears still in her eyes, Rey rounds on him furiously. 

 

“You dying isn’t  _ easier  _ for me,” she bites out. “Do you understand me? Your death solves nothing. It  _ changes  _ nothing.”

 

On the surface his pale face seems impassive, but his mouth works for a moment before he can reply, as though fighting to maintain that same illusion of control in his voice. “I can think of a few people who would disagree with that.”

 

“Petty revenge is not a solution,” Rey snaps, advancing on him. “The galaxy has been repeating this cycle for generations—the Dark rises, the Light pushes back. They slaughter each other until one of them is near extinction, and they call it victory. Sometimes that victory is brief, sometimes it lasts for years. But eventually the cycle starts again.  _ Every _ time.” 

 

There’s a silence as Ben regards her for a moment. When he speaks, his voice is quieter than she’s ever heard it. 

 

“And what does my life change?”

 

“Out here? Disconnected from the Force in the middle of the wilderness? Nothing,” Rey tells him. Ben’s eyes drop to avoid hers as she holds his gaze fiercely, and at once she bends in an effort to maintain that connection, kneeling on the dusty wooden floor in front of his chair. “But make peace with yourself, make peace with the  _ Force _ , and you could be an example. Proof that balance is possible.” 

 

A line of surprise forms between his brows as he stares down at her, and Rey has just enough time to wonder what it is that he’s thinking—why it is that he isn’t  _ saying _ anything—before she realizes that she has planted her hands on both of his legs, gripping a spot just above each knee in her zeal to get through to him. 

 

She releases him, jerking her hands back as though burned. 

 

“Sorry,” Rey rushes out before she can stop herself, scrambling back to her feet in the next instant. “I—you’re injured. Sorry.”

 

As though that was the problem.

 

Ben just continues to  _ stare _ at her, and Rey finds herself floundering. Stooping to gather up her satchel and the ration packets she’d dropped, she begins to speak mostly into the floorboards, saying, “You were looking for food before. I’ll—I’ll go and get something together.”

 

Rey crosses to the battered cookpot sitting atop the toolbox on the other side of the room, staring into it as she hefts it by the handle, determined to avoid his eye. But as she turns to head out, something stops her at the doorway again—perhaps the memory of her earlier departure.

 

“I  _ am _ coming back, if that wasn’t clear,” she says, daring a glance over her shoulder at him. 

 

A reappearance of that familiar, answering scowl gives her some comfort, strangely.


	4. Chapter 4

The storage shed Ben described is fairly well concealed by the thick scarlet foliage, despite the fact that it’s perhaps a mere thirty paces or so behind the cabin. Rey can’t help but take a moment to stare at the thing; it’s tiny, hardly more than two armspans in width and length, but the design of interlocking logs with a roof shingled in tree bark is identical to the cabin’s structure.

 

She runs a hand down the rough wood of the door frame as she enters, admiring the straight, even cuts of the notches where the logs intersect. It’s an odd feeling that floods her, the idea of Ben out here on his own building these things, building them _well._

 

Every time she thinks her idea of him is complete, another piece of the puzzle seems to come along to skew the picture.

 

Along with the preserved meat that he’d mentioned, there’s a rudimentary root cellar dug out of the dirt floor, housing a decent harvest of tuber-like plants. Though she doesn’t recognize many of the plants, Rey passes up the strips of smoked and salted meat in favor of tossing a few of the roots into the pot, knowing Ben’s stomach likely won’t be able to handle much after the ordeal his body has been through.

 

Rey helps herself to some of the split logs stacked against the side of Ben’s cabin, unable to keep from noticing what a _small_ stockpile it is, as though it had been allowed to dwindle for several days with no replenishment. She gets a fire going with relative ease, funneling some of the stream water into the cookpot with the aid of her portable water filter.

 

Rey squints at the handwritten labels in the modest seasoning kit she’s been compiling, eventually deciding on a generous portion of salt and pepper—always a safe choice for livening up field rations—and, after a few discerning sniffs, some paprika and... _negamo_ , the label says. If she’s not completely sure what those last two are, she at least knows they smell quite good. Anyway, Chewie gifted them to her, and she’s never had any reason to question his taste.  

 

An instant broth ration soon joins the vegetables boiling in the pot, and while it’s hardly gourmet fare, the savory smells from the mixture promise something worthy of the word “meal.” It should be a step up from bland polystarch and mysteriously-textured veg meat, at least. When there’s nothing left but to let the concoction stew, Rey pulls the edges of her poncho more tightly around herself, sitting as near to the crackling fire as she dares.

 

There isn’t much about the past year that _hasn’t_ felt surreal, but somehow, cooking for Ben Solo blows all the rest of it out of the water.

 

She closes her eyes for a brief moment, trying instead to savor the way the steam wafting from the pot warms her face and hands, bringing respite to her chilled skin. The bite from the breeze has lessened somewhat as the sun has climbed higher in the sky, but this hemisphere of the planet is plainly in transition to its cold season.

 

Rey looks around as a gust of wind hisses through the treetops, sending a cascade of gold and scarlet leaves fluttering to the forest floor. The beauty of it is breathtaking, but the bare branches left behind bring a frown to her face. If Ben has only been here for half a standard year, it seems unlikely that he’s experienced the brunt of this planet’s winter yet. How far off can that really be, if she’s relishing the warmth of a fire even as proper mid-morning sunlight bathes the bank of the stream?

 

She isn’t the most skilled of chefs, but Rey knows there’s only so long she can sit out here by herself before this soup overcooks. With a bit of fabric from her poncho bunched in her hand to protect it from the heat, she takes up the pot handle, sucks in a deep, steadying breath, and turns to face the cabin door. Doing her best to power through the sudden electric buzzing of her nerves, Rey straightens her shoulders and bustles inside, hoping to project all the brisk, oblivious efficiency of a maintenance droid barging in to make repairs.

 

“Do you have a—” she begins, but cuts off abruptly as a sleeping Ben jolts in his chair with a shout, head snapping up to look at her wildly where it had been lolling on his chest the moment before.

 

“—Bowl,” Rey finishes with wide eyes. She’s unable to fully keep that sparkling note of almost-laughter out of the word as she watches the shock drain from his features. The tips of his ears _ignite,_ glowing red-hot like the embers of the fire she’d kindled outside.

 

“Sorry,” Rey blurts out. She turns away quickly, hiding her face under the guise of needing to go set the pot down on the wooden table. No doubt he’ll become even more impossible than he’d been previously if he sees her lips so much as twitch.

 

Rey chances a glance at him only when she’s positive that she’s in total control of her face. Ben watches her intently from across the room, his dark eyes as wary as if she were some wild creature suddenly invading his cabin.

 

Admittedly, she can see the comparison.

 

“Bowls. Spoons?” Rey tries again, now that he’s properly awake. It seems to break a sort of spell over him—Ben blinks as though suddenly remembering he can look somewhere other than directly at her. His gaze drops, then rises again tentatively, this time aimed at something next to her.

 

“The toolbox,” he tells her, “But just one set of them.” It looks for a moment as though he’s going to say something else, his lips briefly parting with intent, but he leaves it at that.

 

“Don’t worry. They’re for you,” Rey says dryly, fingers quickly undoing the locks on the metal box—and instantly, she realizes what it is he’d held back from saying.

 

It’s a large toolkit, and inside she recognizes a common array of tools for starfighter repair organized into the various compartments and dividers. In the largest section are piled some miscellaneous items: several multi-tools, a shaving razor, a length of coiled string, a bowl with some utensils resting inside the rim...and beneath that, with its tell-tale twin crossguard vents and one red wire down the side, is the hilt of Kylo Ren’s lightsaber.

 

Rey has the strangest urge to pick it up, to weigh the thing in her hands to see if it’s as heavy as she remembers. Instead, hoping she hasn’t been staring down into the box for too long, she closes the lid and sets about pouring out a portion of the soup into the bowl. When she turns to pass it to him, Ben accepts his meal with something of a bewildered look, as though he’d fully expected her to launch into another lecture. But Rey simply parks herself on the floor opposite Ben’s chair with the remainder of the soup, raises the edge of the cookpot to her mouth, and takes a hearty gulp of broth.

 

Rey can hardly remember a time in her life when she’d been picky about her source of nutrients—that first night in the desert, maybe, before she’d learned the way of things—but a hot, seasoned meal out in the field is nothing short of a miracle in her eyes. And so she can’t help but feel a little annoyed when she lowers the rim of the pot to find Ben puzzling down at a spoonful of the stuff, apparently perplexed by the bite he’d just taken.

 

“It’s edible,” Rey grumbles, “Boiled the water and everything. Totally safe.” An unwelcome warmth begins to creep into her cheeks, and she brings the pot back up to her mouth, taking another swallow of soup to hide her face.

 

“No, it—it’s fine,” Ben says almost absently. And then, seeming to catch the unflattering wording a few seconds too late, scrambles to amend: “It’s good.”

 

Rey can’t hold back the unamused glare this time as she lowers the cookpot once more.

 

“It is,” Ben continues. “It’s just—the spices.” To Rey’s surprise, his expression flickers with pain, eyes sliding shut in something close to a wince. Somehow, Rey is certain without even asking that it’s nothing to do with his injury. But...the _spices?_

 

“It reminds me of...something,” Ben goes on. “A dish I used to have. As a child.” He seems to be taking some pains to keep his tone offhand, even with his eyes screwed shut in such plain distress. And then it hits her. These are _Kashyyyk_ spices.

 

Rey doesn’t quite know what to say to that.

 

She wishes, oddly, that there was some reassurance she could give him about the last remaining tie to his family—but she suspects Chewbacca’s feelings about Ben are even more complicated than her own. She can’t pretend to be able to put words to any of them. Chewie had been the one to take her to Ben that first time, but he’d been her rescue _from_ him dozens of times as well. He’d seemed to know where she was headed on her mysterious trip, and hadn’t tried to stop her—but hadn’t offered to come along, either. Rey can’t make any promises of what reaction might await Ben should the two ever meet again.

 

He opens his eyes, regret etched deeply into his features. Then he pales at the sight of her in front of him, perhaps only just realizing the personal nature of the words that had come out of his mouth. He turns his attention back to his meal a little too purposefully, eating in silence.

 

 _I cried for my parents in front of you, once_ , Rey thinks, letting her gaze linger on his bowed head. _I showed you the empty place in my heart, and you reached out to me._ It’s strange to think that there is anything left in the world that he should feel ashamed to say to her. A sudden desperation for the connection of their bond washes over her, for the way it had forced them to share these thoughts that their stubborn mouths won’t speak aloud.

 

Rey finishes her meal in silence as well.

 

When she has drained the last dregs of broth from the pot, Rey wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and gets to her feet, trying to judge the position of the sun through the window. It’s approaching midmorning now; if there’s any trekking through the forest to be done, she should get moving soon to ensure she’s in no danger of trying to race the sunset back to Ben’s cabin.

 

“I ought to go check on the _Falcon_ ,” Rey says, almost speaking more to the room than directly to Ben in her effort to keep her tone businesslike. “If your story is anything to go by, there may be some overgrowth I need to fend off—and I want to put it down somewhere close by so the supplies are at hand. I didn’t see anything on foot, but I figure from above I’ll be able to spot something.”

 

“You didn’t land close by?” Ben asks, a look of concern suddenly shadowing his face.

 

“Not particularly,” Rey tells him, feeling her eyebrows creep upward at his reaction. “Several miles away, at least. I’ll be a few hours, the walk back there will probably be—what?” Rey asks, cutting herself off as Ben stares at her in apparent disbelief.

 

“And you made it here with no issue?” he asks.

 

Rey shifts uncomfortably under his gaze. “Well, I did mention I had help—”

 

“But nothing _happened_?” he asks, tone more insistent, as though certain she must be concealing something.

 

“I’m not sure the Force sending me a mysterious bird-guide counts as _nothing_ ,” Rey begins, but Ben is shaking his head now.

 

“This forest...it isn’t right, sometimes,” he says, “Not just the plants. Some areas are fine, like here, but the deep woods…” he trails off for a moment. “Things change out there.”

 

Rey frowns. The journey here had been difficult, certainly; the bird had led a winding path through the tough terrain, and she’d nearly lost track of it more than once, but the forest itself had hardly seemed strange. Nor had anything stood out to her when she’d hiked a wide circle around the cabin site. “Change? How?”

 

Ben’s eyes flick away, as though remembering. “You can walk in a straight line and end up back where you started. Time gets away from you. Even the creatures start to behave...irregularly.”

 

Rey eyes him carefully. She’s never heard him talk like this before, like he’s trying to conceal just how much of a fright he’s had, encountering things he’s never seen in all his years of training. Rey can’t say _she’s_ ever seen anything like what he’s describing, and he’s been ill for days now, crazed with fever...but she can hardly pretend to be fully acquainted with the strangeness of the Force.

 

“Is...that what happened to you?” she asks.

 

“I was hunting several days ago,” Ben tells her. “But I wasn’t finding anything—so I went farther out than I knew I should have, lost track of time. I knew better, but I was hoping to build up a surplus. The cold is starting to set in.”

 

“I noticed,” Rey murmurs before she can catch herself, rubbing at her arms in a meager attempt to generate a little friction. She’d found the crispness of the air pleasing at first, a novelty after the sultry humidity of deep summer on Naboo. But now, a night and a day without suitably warm attire or the luxury of indoor heating have begun to take their toll.   

 

Ben’s eyes seem to catch on the motion of her hands for a moment, but then he blinks, coming back to himself. “I tracked a small herd of gallaze out into the deep woods, hoping to pick a few off. But I wasn’t the only thing following them, apparently.” Almost subconsciously, he touches a hand to his wounded side at those words.

 

“What was it?” Rey’s voice comes out just softly enough to surprise her.

 

Before he responds, Ben’s fingers trace over the area where she knows the bandage lies beneath. It’s an oddly gentle movement from him, one that barely disturbs the way the fabric of his shirt lays across the planes of his torso. She swallows before raising her eyes to meet his again.

 

He shakes his head slowly, as if still in disbelief all these days later. “I’ve never seen anything like it before that I know of. It must have been the size of a bear, but it was as if it came out of thin air. It was so dark by that point I could barely see anything, but I’m not sure I’d have recognized it even in the day. I’ve run into surprisingly few predators out here, and I’ve never been that far west of the river before. The tusks, though...those were hard to miss.”

 

“It gored you,” Rey realizes aloud, horror-struck, remembering the unsettling depth to the wound when she’d examined it. An inch lower, and the thing might have skewered one of his kidneys. “How did you get away?”

 

Ben grimaces. “Managed to carve a piece out of its side. Not enough to bring it down, but it did disappear after that. I can only hope it died of its injuries somewhere out there in the forest, but...” he trails off, the doubt plain in his voice. “I don’t remember much of how I got back here, only that I did. I cleaned myself up as best I could, but...you yourself have seen the insufficiency of my supplies.”

 

Something about the carefully dry inflection on that last part causes Rey to color slightly, remembering how she’d lectured him about the dangerous lack of medical necessities in his kit. She can’t be sure, but she thinks she sees the most subtle twitch at the corner of his mouth in response.

 

“You were outside when I found you, across the stream,” she presses on, in hopes of ignoring that little exchange. “What were you doing back out here if you’d already made it home?”

 

“Couldn’t tell you,” Ben replies bleakly. “I knew I was getting worse, but there wasn’t much I could do with what I had. The thirst might have driven me outside to the water, and then...who knows, after that.”

 

Rey can’t repress a sympathetic shudder. She can hardly keep count of the amount of times she’d nearly succumbed to thirst in the desert, and it isn’t a fate she’d wish on her worst enemy.

 

And...Ben is not her worst enemy anymore. Not even close. The thought is a strangely warm, heavy feeling in her stomach, though she herself realizes that it should hardly be a surprise. She risked everything to secret him away, and hadn’t hesitated to cross the galaxy the instant she thought he might be in danger.

 

No, this shouldn’t be a surprise at all. And yet she feels wholly unprepared for it all the same.

 

Before she knows what she’s doing, Rey picks up her bag, overcome with an urge to put some distance between them before her brain comes to any more startling conclusions.  

 

“Believe me when I say I heed your warning,” Rey tries to assure Ben briskly as his face clouds over, realizing her intention. “But we’re going to need the _Falcon_ , and you’re in no state to go with me.”

 

“Have you been listening to anything I’ve been saying?” Ben bursts out, dark eyes flashing. “It’s a _bad_ _idea.”_

 

“Do you have a better one that doesn’t involve waiting days for you to be able to walk upright?” she asks. “The _Falcon_ could be unsalvageable by then, and we’d _both_ be stranded.”

 

“You _cannot_ go out there alone,” he tells her in clipped tones, clearly straining to temper the anger in his voice. As though wishing there was something more behind his voice, something that could make her obey. But that had never worked on her, even before he’d cut himself off from the Force. Rey narrows her eyes.

 

“I _am_ going,” she tells him, the note of finality clear in her voice. “I promised someone I’d bring that ship back in one piece.”

 

“Rey—”

 

“This forest hasn’t taken kindly to you being cut off from the Force, Ben,” Rey reminds him, “We don’t know that it will have the same reaction to me. I was just out there earlier, and nothing strange happened. I have to take the risk.”

 

“You don’t know what you’re dealing with,” Ben practically growls. He glowers at her, a muscle jumping in the tense set of his jaw, refusing to yield. They’ve always been like this, an unstoppable force and an immovable object—and yet she can see the frustration in his eyes, knowing that this time there’s nothing he can say, nothing he can physically do to stop her.

 

She really ought to ask him to get out of that damn chair and lie down properly while she’s gone, but Rey can feel that he’s at the upper limit of his composure even without the benefit of a Force bond. Instead, she grabs another sealed bacta patch and a ration bar from her pack and tosses them onto the bed beside him.

 

“ _If_ I’m gone for longer than I expect, you might need those,” she tells him, “But the bacta shouldn’t need to be replaced until nightfall.”

 

She doesn’t expect an answer to that, and she doesn’t get one.

 

But when she slings the satchel on and turns toward the door, she hears him mutter something that she can’t quite make out.

 

“What was that?” she asks, shooting him a confused look over her shoulder.

 

The line of his mouth is pressed tight, as though considering not responding to her at all. But to her surprise, the next word out of him isn’t a sullen _nothing_ or a harsh rebuke.

 

“The cloak,” he speaks up, with the tone of someone who deeply regrets having opened their mouth in the first place, “Take it.”

 

She stares at him.

 

“For the cold,” he adds gruffly, after a second with no reply from her.

 

Rey blinks at him before turning her bewildered gaze on the peg by the door. On it hangs a cloak of black fabric, the thick material woven into a textured pattern. The garment is shapeless as it hangs loosely from the wall, but Rey’s mouth still goes dry.

 

She knows this cloak.

 

A refusal comes almost reflexively to her lips—it’s _Kylo Ren’s_ cloak, of all things—but it dies there just as quickly when she turns back to him and sees his face. His eyes dart away from her as though in disbelief of his own stupidity, with the air of someone steeling himself for certain rejection.

 

And then his eyes go wide for the barest fraction of a second as she reaches out a hand.

 

It’s softer than she expects at first touch, though there is a sturdiness to the fabric as she lifts it from the peg which tells her it must be practical in the elements. Rey looks it over appraisingly. The hem of the cloak pools on the floorboards at her feet even as she holds it up for inspection, and her eyes can’t resist a glance at the long legs kicked out in front of Ben’s chair. She’s on the taller side for a human woman, but there’s no doubt she’ll have to drape it more heavily around her shoulders to keep it from dragging on the ground as she walks.

 

With that thought, she folds the fabric over one arm. Though Ben’s expression is now schooled into careful indifference, his look still sends her stomach twisting with the odd certainty that shrugging into this cloak— _his_ cloak—in front of him will somehow leave her feeling _more_ exposed.

 

Rey isn’t the most eloquent person on the best of days, and the heavy-lidded gaze trained on her isn’t helping things much. _Goodbye_ isn’t a sentiment she’s fond of, not when she’s absolutely, certainly coming back. A glib _don’t go anywhere_ doesn’t seem right either, not with the gift of his cloak folded against her chest. And _be back soon_ is just begging for some kind of cosmic interference.

 

“Thanks,” is what she settles on, mumbled slightly in her embarrassment as she opens the door with a long, slow _creak._

 

“Rey,” Ben says again, something odd in his voice, and she turns around _far_ more eagerly than she’d care to admit.

 

His jaw works for a moment as he stares at her, apparently trying to will himself to say something. But after a few seconds his eyes drift downward again, and it becomes plain that no other words are going to follow.

 

Rey feels her lips bend half-heartedly upward in a sad kind of smile.

 

“Try and get some rest,” she says finally, and passes through the doorway before she has time to ponder a source for the pang of disappointment now blooming in her chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I CANNOT tell you how much I appreciate your patience. I'm so sorry for the wait! The last few comments I got really kicked me back into gear, so thanks very much to everyone for your lovely messages! 
> 
> Let me tell you something: I did plan on the next chapter being the fifth and final chapter, but I was thinking of going to an extra sixth chapter for potentially...extra...reasons. Let me know what you think, if you think it feels more natural to wrap this up, or if you want to spend a little more time with it. Thanks again for reading!!!


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